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In a letter to British Foreign Secretary David Lammy, eight British Parliamentarians call for the release of Dr. Wang Bingzhang, who was abducted in Vietnam in 2002 and sentenced to life imprisonment in China for his pro-democracy activities. He has spent 23 years in solitary confinement. Now aged 77, concerns are growing about Dr. Wang’s physical and mental health.

Archived

On June 27, 2002, Dr. Wang was in Mong Cai, a city in Vietnam bordering China, meeting Chinese labor activists. A group of men reportedly accosted him and forced him into a waiting van, which then transported him by boat to China. The Guangxi Public Security Bureau then took him into custody, and he was later charged with “offenses of espionage” and “the conduct of terrorist activities.” He was tried by the Intermediate People’s Court in Shenzhen, and sentenced to life imprisonment. His trial lasted only half a day and was closed to the public, and he was denied the right to due process, access to a lawyer, and a fair trial.

[...]

“We warmly welcome these initiatives by British Parliamentarians to highlight the appalling case of Dr. Wang Bingzhang, who has endured solitary confinement in a Chinese jail for 23 years and whose abduction from Vietnam and forced rendition to China is widely recognised as arbitrary and in violation of international law,” said Benedict Rogers, Senior Director at Fortify Rights.

“Governments worldwide should condemn this egregious case of transnational repression.”

[...]

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A British lawmaker who visited the Swiss research center of one of the world’s largest tobacco companies is proposing a delay to the U.K.’s planned ban on the sale of heated tobacco products – potentially excluding them from landmark legislation slated to go into effect in two years.

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Archive.

Police believe live facial recognition cameras may become “commonplace” in England and Wales, according to internal documents, with the number of faces scanned having doubled to nearly 5m in the last year.

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Archived

[British] MPs have claimed they were banned from attending a meeting between Chinese officials and an arm of the Foreign Office at the request of Beijing.

The Great Britain China Centre (GBCC), an arms-length body of the Foreign Office, will host Chinese officials this month, with MPs invited to attend.

But those who have been sanctioned by the Chinese Communist Party for raising concerns about human rights abuses said they were told they will not be welcome because Chinese officials may not be authorised to meet with them.

The Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (Ipac) said to let China decide who was allowed to attend would be “subjugating the interests of our people to those of an authoritarian dictatorship”.

The Times understands that GBCC officials contacted Ipac, which has members from parliaments across the world, to ask if any of its MPs wanted to join the discussion.

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Tom Tugendhat, the former security minister and one of those who has been sanctioned, told The Times: “I’m sure the FCDO did not intend to reinforce China’s sanctions that ministers have told us they’ve raised frequently in Beijing. It appears this message got lost in translation. I hope the government will seize the opportunity to reassure parliament that we will not allow ourselves to be divided according to the designs of the Chinese Communist Party.”

Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory leader who is also on the sanctions list, said he was “sure [the decision] was made by the Chinese state and the Great British China Centre should have the guts to say to them we don’t do meetings like that”. He added: “We don’t ban certain people. That shows a lack of courage on their part.”

[...]

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submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 
 

The Sun: Owned by Billionaire Rupert Murdoch 🇺🇸 🇦🇺

The Times and The Sunday Times: Owned by Billionaire Rupert Murdoch 🇺🇸 🇦🇺

The Daily Telegraph: Owned by Red Bird, a US Investment firm. 🇺🇸

GB News: Owned by Paul Marshall, a London financier.

The Spectator: Owned by Paul Marshall, a London financier.

The Daily Mail: Owned by Lord Jonathan Harmsworth, 4th Viscount Rothermere. He is a member of the House of Lords .

The Observer: Owned by James Harding and by the billionaire Thomson family which owns Thomson Reuters 🇨🇦

Byline Times: It's owned by JTC Trustees (58%), Peter Jukes (18.6%) and Stephen Colegrave (18.5%)

Prospect: It's a non-profit newsroom owned by the Resolution Trust

The Independent: Owned by Evgeny Lebedev 🇷🇺 and Muhammad Abuljadayel 🇸🇦

Private Eye: Privately owned by a company named Pressdram. The owner seem to be Ian Hislop, Sheila Ann Molnar and Geoff Michael Elwell

The Economist: Owned by the Billionaire Agnelli family 🇮🇹. The Cadburry family and the Rothschild family are major shareholders.

The Guardian: It's a non-profit newspaper owned by the Scott Trust.

The Financial Times: Owned by Nikkei 🇯🇵



As a non-brit, here are my observations.

  • I think the 3 best papers in Britain are the Financial Times, The Guardian (which I financially support!) and Private Eye.

  • The FT is the most expensive newspaper in the world. The quality of the foreign, political and business reporting is absolutely outstanding. The articles are short, useful and full of insight. You really understand why rich businessmen love this paper. However, their environment coverage and labor-rights coverage is often substandard. I also don't always agree with some of the right-wing tone.

  • The Guardian gets a lot of unfair criticism because people don't like some silly opinion pieces. I find this ridiculous. Most UK papers have published very silly pieces. Most opinion pieces in the Guardian are actually quiet interesting. The Guardian investigative journalism is a jewel. Their editorial independence allows them to pursue stories other UK papers don't have the guts to publish.

  • Private Eye is absolutely lovely

  • The Byline Times is a small and wonderful newspaper. But it's also strange. They do a lot of great journalism, they keep exposing water companies, corrupt lobbying, scandals. Yet they are owned by... a financial firm based in Jersey?! It just doesn't make a lot of sense. Why would a financial firm support a newspaper against the establishment...?

  • I really hate The Economist 😡. The current chairman of The Economist is a House of Lords member named Paul Deighton. A former Goldman Sachs banker, friend of David Cameron, he was in charge of PPE contracts during Covid 19.

From the New York Times:

To shine a light on one of the greatest spending sprees in Britain’s postwar era, The New York Times analyzed a large segment of it, the roughly 1,200 central government contracts that have been made public, together worth nearly $22 billion. Of that, about $11 billion went to companies either run by friends and associates of politicians in the Conservative Party, or with no prior experience or a history of controversy. Meanwhile, smaller firms without political clout got nowhere.

The procurement system was cobbled together during a meeting of anxious bureaucrats in late March, and a wealthy former investment banker and Conservative Party grandee, Paul Deighton, who sits in the House of Lords, was later tapped to act as the government’s czar for personal protective equipment.

Lord Deighton helped the government award billions of dollars in contracts –– including hundreds of millions to several companies where he has financial interests or personal connections.

Dozens of companies that won a total of $3.6 billion in contracts had poor credit, and several had declared assets of just $2 or $3 each. Others had histories of fraud, human rights abuses, tax evasion or other serious controversies. A few were set up on the spur of the moment or had no relevant experience — and still won contracts.

Lord Deighton, who was once a Goldman Sachs executive, remains involved in business and has financial or personal connections to at least seven companies that were awarded lucrative government contracts totalling nearly $300 million, the Times has learned.

Many companies and business people, often better qualified to produce P.P.E. but lacking political connections, had no access.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/12/17/world/europe/britain-covid-contracts.html

Why is Lord Paul Deighton still chairman of The Economist?!!!

https://www.economistgroup.com/esg/board

Fuck the corrupt Economist.

  • A lot of quality small local newspapers doing an amazing job are financially struggling. It's very sad.

  • Rupert Murdoch, who also owns Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, actively encouraged Tony Blair to bomb Iraq. He spread climate change denial in Australia. He once told John Major to change British Foreign Policy.

  • It's just bonkers that the owner of the Daily Mail (Jonathan Harmsworth) is also a House of Lords member.

  • I don't often read Prospect, but when I do, I find the articles pretty damn good. The editor (Alan Rustbridger) won many awards for breaking the Edward Snowden NSA leaks.

  • The new rising media figure is Paul Marshall. He created GB News to push Trump-style politics. I think a lot of people on the UK-right will cosy up him.

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crosspostato da: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/35703805

Archived

[Op-ed by Benedict Rogers, Senior Director of Fortify Rights and a co-founder and trustee of Hong Kong Watch.]

Dictatorships use solitary confinement as a form of torture, designed to break the prisoner’s spirit. Under international law, “prolonged solitary confinement” is defined as exceeding 15 days.

British citizen and 77 year-old media entrepreneur Jimmy Lai, in jail in Hong Kong, has now exceeded 1,600 days in solitary confinement, yet has committed no crime.

He has already served several prison sentences on multiple trumped-up charges, including 13 months for lighting a candle and saying a prayer at a vigil commemorating the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

[...]

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Very good opinion piece.

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Party leader says he wants UK to be a ‘crypto powerhouse’ during speech at Las Vegas conference

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For me the amazing thing about this story is not that some chancer shipped in a load of tea from elsewhere and repackaged it as Scottish, but that he kept the scam going for a decade or more and was only found out when the local council checked to see if he had a food handling licence.

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Quality article.

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